Notes from Nashman Center sponsored workshops, panel presentations, and more.
Chloe King, a senior and former Knapp Fellow winner for 2017-2018, was recently featured in the GW Hatchet in recognition of her new organization, Last Call for Food, which gives students access to cheaper meal plans for students utilizing leftover food. You can check out the Hatchet article here.
Chloe has also been spotlighted on our blog here and met with President Knapp in May 2018 along with other Knapp Fellows. For more information about the Knapp Fellowship, click here or here.
The Faculty Learning Community studying Community Based Participatory Research gathered this week for their first meeting of the semester. After sharing progress on our research endeavors, we focused our conversation on issues related to building mutual trust and empowerment in community partner relationships. A few highlights:
If you are interested in joining a Faculty Learning Community in 2019, contact Wendy Wagner: wagnerw@gwu.edu.
Check out Dr. Maranda Ward: The Practitioner's Perspective - A Tale of Two Cities: My Health Equity Work in the Nation's Capital
Her research is translated into practice as the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Promising Futures. In her blog, she takes you on a bus ride from an affluent part of town replete with healthy and abundant food options and services, to her neighborhood, where residents struggle to even meet their most basic needs. She uses these examples to engage students in understanding structural inequity.
President Knapp met with 2017-2018 Knapp Fellows Chloe King and Gayatri Malhotra to hear about the projects that they undertook over the course of the year and how community engaged scholarship made a difference in the places that they conducted their projects. Want to learn more about Gayatri's project? Check out this interview with her https://www.gwnashmancenter.org/the-nashman-faculty-update/2017/12/22/knapp-fellow-spotlight-gayatri-malhotra learn more about Chloe's project here https://www.gwnashmancenter.org/the-nashman-faculty-update/2017/11/3/knapp-fellow
We are so proud of the outgoing Knapp Fellows as was President Knapp!
He also met with incoming Knapp Fellows Gillian Joseph and Kristen McInerney to hear about their planned Knapp Fellowship projects for the 2018-2019 academic year and how they will engage the community with their research. To see what inspires Gillian and Kristen's work check out their interviews here:
The Spring 2018 Symposium on Community Engaged Scholarship included presentations from students in the Law School, Graduate School of Education and Human Development, Columbian College, Milken School of Public Health and GW Nursing School.
Breakout sessions highlighted student work in University Writing, Spanish, Human Service Social Justice and History courses in addition to work done by GW Nashman Center in on Ethics of Service, GW School of Business innovations projects and the work of Knapp Fellow Chloe King on Food Waste in DC Public Schools.
New Knapp Fellows Kristen McInerney and Gillian Joseph were announced at the event and Peter Konwerski was awarded the Faculty Engagement Award by Honey Nashman.
The poster session encompassed scholarship from students and faculty in every corner of campus and across a wide variety of disciplines. There were over 88 student presenters and the full program can be found here.
Thanks to everyone for sharing your community engaged scholarship!
Kristen McInerney is one of two Knapp Fellowship winners for the 2018-2019 school year. Community Engaged Scholar Ashley Hidalgo sat down to discuss Kristen's project with her.
Tell me about your project and how you believe/hope that your scholarship will impact the community you are doing research with?
Kristen McInerney (KM): My research project, stems from my experience with English Learners (ELs) who struggled or are struggling in our traditional high school models and I formerly worked at a few different high schools with a growing EL population. My belief is that our current high schools are not set up for English Learners, and that inspired me to apply to this Graduate School of Education and Human Development Doctoral program in Curriculum and Instruction, to see how we can improve the outcomes for ELs. With my research I hope to gather data, that we don’t typically gather upon enrollment of a student, and use it to predict and analyze student outcomes, such as grades and graduation. I am also interested in Resilience Theory and how that relates to my students’ experience in high school. This scholarship will directly impact the immigrant students that I work with and their families and bring the community together. Daily I work with bright, strong, multi-lingual, independent, and inspiring international students who deserve to graduate just like their native English-speaking peers.
AH: That is truly inspiring. What kinds of research methods/methodologies will your research use? I know it was mentioned earlier, but could you elaborate on how these methods bring the community into your work?
KM: My Research Project is my dissertation idea, which is a mixed-methods, explanatory sequential case study, which is beginning with the quantitative data piece to inform qualitative data collection to gain a richer understanding of my students experiences in hopes to tailor programming and policies for English learners. To build community partnerships, I would like to partner with Art Therapists, possibly GW's Art department, to build a mosaic or puzzle mural within our school and share with the wider community. Each student and staff member would create a piece, then it would be combined into a beautiful mosaic, where every single piece is valued and holds an important part in our community. Students will create their design focusing on their identity, the theme of resilience, and what success means for them.
AH: These forms of data collection will be very impactful for students. Why do you think it is important for student researchers (and researchers in general) to incorporate members of the community into research?
KM: Partnerships with the community are incredibly important especially with my population of students as English learners, and really all students. When you think about supporting the whole child and their family, whether they are here or in their home country, it is important to foster a new welcoming home. I think that community partnerships and community participatory action research is really important because the community has a sense of shared ownership, vision, and call to action.
AH: Do you have a favorite researcher/community scholar/activist who inspires you? If so, would you share a quote from them (or a book or article they wrote)?
KM: I have been re-reading the LISA Study by Suarez-Orozco, Suarez-Orozco, and Todorova who did a 5 year longitudinal study of immigrant youth in American high schools. They state in their conclusion, “Immigrant-origin youth come with big dreams and their initial boundless energies and optimism offer a great, if untapped, National resource.” I see that everyday in my students, their energy, their smiles, their excitement, and alongside their tears, and other concerns, and sadness. There is so much potential and strength and assets that our students have, like said if untapped or should be tapped, it is certainly a wealth of knowledge. And to be bilingual or trilingual there are so many things that our students can do and I want to give them the tools and opportunity to do so.
AH: What a great quote! You could have chosen many different ways to do your research-why involve the community? What do you think it adds to the research by doing this?
KM: I believe that my research holds more meaning and it is more empowering when it involves the community. Just like the school that I work in, the staff as a whole has a common passion goal, and drive Also, the more awareness we can draw to a problem, the more potential solutions we can find. And the greater the call to action and greater impact can happen.
AH: Do you anticipate working with any community partners (non-profits, other scholars, students here at GW other students or public institutions (schools, hospitals etc.), in this research?
KM: Yes, I definitely am reaching out to people who are involved with Art Therapy and other forms of social work and dealing with trauma. I know that GW has an Art Therapy program, so I am hoping to build a partnership with them, but I really think that developing partnerships especially for our students will really be able to help us able to reach them and provide the best experience possible in our school.
AH: Is there anything you’d like to say to Former GW President and Mrs. Knapp for funding the Fellowship?
KM: Yes, it is an incredible honor and I would want to first say thank you for believing in my students. They are the reason why we do what we do, and for them to recognize my student population as valuable and worthy, of having one of the best experiences possible in our high schools, that goes a long way trusting and for believing in me. Thank you for seeing ahead, and funding something that is a big passion of mine and for helping me make a difference in my community. It is truly a humbling opportunity and I have a lot of work to do on the project but I would say thank you for believing in me.
Bianca Trinidad is a Community Engaged Scholar with the Nashman Center. She sat down to talk with Gillian Joseph one of two winners of the 2018-2019 Knapp Fellowship Award.
Bianca: Tell me about your project.
Gillian: So, I named my project, Find Our Women, but the purpose of it is to provide an answer to the unanswered - to give part of a solution to the missing and murdered indigenous women crisis that’s going on in the U.S. and also in Canada, but the U.S. has no public inquiry into it, whereas Canada does. So, there’s really been nothing done formally to help indigenous women that have been going missing and being killed in the U.S.
My project revolves around creating a website and also a mobile application for phones, because a huge problem is how information flows between police networks and reservations, because a lot of times they’re really rural and isolated.
My project is trying to make it easier for women and the families of women to report when they’re missing or something is wrong. And to have a formal database. You see, indigenous women don’t have their own database and they’re not always registered under a federal missing persons database. So, that’s really important to actually have data on, because there is no true data on indigenous women going missing. A lot of the data is collected from community members that are like “My aunt is still missing” or “My sister is still missing”. So, that’s the biggest part of it.
The website will have all the resources needed on it and a lot of facts and statistics. There’s no one place that you can go to to get facts and stats, and so, I’m hoping that my website would make it easier for indigenous women to have resources they need, such as hotline numbers or other websites that will be useful to them. Any information that needs to go to them will be on the website and also, just for the general public to have a place to go, because I feel like it’s hard to get people to pay attention, and it’s really hard if you tell them about it, and they have to Google search for about half an hour in order to find anything. So hopefully, it will make it easier to raise awareness.
The last part of my project is getting firsthand accounts and stories of families of missing women and survivors that have gone missing or have had experience with domestic violence and for them to be able to share their stories about it. This collection of stories will be posted on the website, and accessible to the public. I feel like a lot of times, people care more when they hear a firsthand account. I feel like it’s hard to understand what is actually going on. A lot of people don’t know anything about it - which is expected. It’s not really publicized. So getting traction behind it and showing indigenous voices, instead of talking over them.
Bianca: So, what inspired you to take on this kind of project?
Gillian: I’m actually part Dakota. My dad is Dakota, my mom is white. So, my dad is from South Dakota, and I actually spent last summer living on the Cheyenne Reservation in South Dakota, and culturally, it is really important to protect women, because women are considered sacred in a lot of Dakota tribes and also in general Native culture.
I’ve heard stories from my dad, and it’s been going on since my dad was a kid and before then. And my friends; and just like knowing that women I’m related to or are in the same tribe or tribal nation as me are going missing is - it’s a lot to think about, because it’s not always in your mind. But when you have that attachment to it, it is.
So I would talk to my dad about it a lot and to other people. I have a really awesome mentor. My faculty advisor here; she is also a Native woman. So talking to her about it and to other Native women really helped me decide that it wasn’t enough for me to just talk about it. But instead, I need to actually offer what I thought could maybe help. We’ll see if it does! I think it will!
Bianca: I definitely think it will. Okay, so how do you hope this fellowship will affect the community you are doing research with?
Gillian: So, I truly hope that it will give at least the native communities, well I would be focusing more on the Dakotas, just because that’s where I have a relational tie to. But I’m hoping that it will really give indigenous women a voice in this nation, because a lot of times I see people talking about MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), but never mention actual women, and so, they just turn into an epidemic and not people. So, it dehumanizes them in a way. And so, that would be really effective, and also having this data from the database collected and giving indigenous women a way to have to report their family and their friends, and just having that power, which is a basic human right. Having that will hopefully: a) create awareness for the community and have people take it more seriously and b) eventually get the government to help officially recognize that.
Bianca: So what kinds of research methods will your research use and how do these methods bring the community into your work?
Gillian: I think a lot of times people think about research in a very different way than Native culture and communities do. So, when you go to an actual tribe or community in a reservation, and hand out surveys, they would be like “what are you talking about?”. It wouldn’t translate very well. But a really big value with research and doing research, in a way that Native people do, is a lot of discussion. I’ll be going to South Dakota and will talk to tribal elders, members and of course, women to try to understand what they think they need and what they want to see out of it, because that’s the best way to do research: to have those kinds of big round table discussions. For quantitative research, the database will definitely be a big part of that, and it will be directly from indigenous communities. I’ll be able to look at that data and see what’s happening. A lot of times, people report to police officers or they’re reported online, like people post about it on Facebook groups and stuff. So, that data will be collected from those sites and will be put into one place, so that you can actually find it.
Bianca: Why do you think it is important for student researchers or researchers in general to incorporate members of the community into research?
Gillian: So, sometimes it is the difference between helping someone and helping provide the resources to help someone. So, this idea of not talking over people and not implementing something onto the community, but with the community. Especially with Native communities, there’s a long history of people who try to help in a way that is more along the lines of white saviorship than actual help. So, I think when you integrate people from a community into your project, you’re actually helping the community more, because you’re putting their voices first; you’re understanding more about what they actually need and not what you think they need.
Bianca: I agree. So next question, do you have a favorite researcher, community scholar, or activist who inspires you?
Gillian: Hmm, that’s a really good question. I never really thought about that. I don’t know. I’m always really impressed by other Native American women; like regardless of who they are and what they’re doing. Whenever I see them being really active, whether it’s helping their community in general or the broader Native community or general public, it’s always so awesome to see that. You know, it’s inspiring. A lot of times, I think I never see Native women in a public space, so that’s really cool; like Winona Laduke, she’s a Native activist. In general, native women inspire me.
Bianca: You could’ve chosen several different ways to do your research, so why involve the community?
Gillian: Native values and that cultural understanding of putting their voices first are really important to me. I don’t want to talk over anyone, because it should be coming from the survivors and their families, and from the women’s ideas and voices.
Bianca: So, do you anticipate working with any community partners in this research?
Gillian: I haven’t formally signed on with any community partners. In the future, possibly. There’s not a huge amount of Native American Women-specific organizations. I can only think of one: The National Indigenous Women's Resource Center, and I’ve talked to them a little. We haven’t formally agreed to anything. I’m sure that there will be other organizations that will be able to help me, or at least help me with resources and guidance. The community is really awesome. I feel like if you ask a question, people will be able to answer it.
Bianca: Okay, so last but not least, is there anything you’d like to say to the Former GW President and Mrs. Knapp for funding the fellowship?
Gillian: Thank you so much! When I heard the news that I won the fellowship, I called my dad and we were both crying, because there’s just nothing that addresses what indigenous women go through and how important Native American women are. So yeah, that’s kind of cool to know that this fellowship is funding something that should’ve been funded long ago, and I’m glad that I can be that person to help get it through and who helped get it funded. So, thank you.
Bianca: Congratulations once again! I think that what you are doing is incredible and super inspiring.
Gayatri Malhotra is a Knapp Fellow working with organizations such as Teach for India and Girl Rising on a gender sensitization curriculum in New Delhi. She is studying for her Master in Public Health at the Milken Institute of Public Health and previously studied Biology at Lawrence University, WI. Aleena Khan, a service-learning scholar here at the Nashman Center, spoke to Gayatri about her Gender Equality project and her experience as a Knapp Fellow.
Aleena: Can you briefly describe your project?
Gayatri: There is a lot of gender-based discrimination that happens in schools, especially in India. If you think about it, kids in India are in school a lot; we are a society in India that really prioritizes schoolwork, getting high marks, doing well in school, and are very career-oriented. There’s no emphasis on extra-curriculars, creativity, art, or sports, so students are spending a lot of time in school. This is where some of these entrenched behaviors occur. Since the teachers, parents, and communities have deep-rooted biases, students learn from them, where they continue to enact those behaviors.
For that reason, I wanted to focus on adolescent-aged students, basically fifth to ninth graders, and to assess gender norms, beliefs and attitudes. To date, there has not been much work done in this area in India.
To that extent, I am working with Girl Rising (GR) and utilizing their gender sensitization curriculum to conduct a feasibility study in Teach for India (TFI) urban-slum schools - specifically government-run schools - in New Delhi. We are evaluating five schools and one after-school community center to see how efficacious the gender-sensitization curriculum would be. Ideally, we would like to implement the GR gender sensitization curriculum nationwide.
The gender-sensitization curriculum specifically uses constructs from the positive youth development scales in addition to looking at gender norms, beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions of middle school students in these government schools in Delhi. In addition, the curriculum addresses topics such as child labor, child marriage, poverty, gender-based violence, and menstruation. Teachers have been trained through a train-the-training workshop and thus are able to provide the program. The teachers have also been provided a teacher’s guide to help implement the program.
In April, I plan to go back to conduct the post-assessment and see if there have been any changes in the students and the teachers.
I chose to work with TFI because while conversations around child marriage, labor and trafficking are difficult to have, young teachers from TIF are already having these discussions in their classroom but don’t have a formal structure or a way to fully address them in a way students can really learn and take action in the community. Girl Rising had already created the gender-sensitization curriculum and by partnering with TFI, we are able to implement the program in these very low socioeconomic government schools and reach a larger community in need. We are hoping to use this data to work with the Indian government and other government schools country-wide.
A: So when you collect that data, you’re planning on taking it to the Indian government?
G: We’re hoping to really scale it up by working with TFI. Right now, we are in the pilot phase and only in a few schools in Delhi. We want to work with TFI to expand the gender sensitization curriculum in all their partnered schools in six major cities. country-wide. We want to take it to the Indian Board of School Education and ask them, “What are the possibilities of this being a part of your required curriculum?”
A: How did you select the schools?
G: I wanted to evaluate schools from low socioeconomic communities -- I wanted them to be urban-slum areas that have deep-rooted gender biases in the community. We also selected schools depending on the interest of the TFI Fellows and their willingness to implement this 24-week gender sensitization curriculum in their schools. We tried to select second-year TFI Fellows who had more experience working at schools in these communities.
A: Did you look at the demographics for each school? Or was the selection based mostly on socioeconomic status?
G: It was mostly low socioeconomic status. We did look at some of the demographics-- we have some all-girl schools-- to see the difference between co-ed and all-girl schools and all-boy schools. We did not look at private schools in India since our focus was on government/ public schools.
It’s not an easy project, especially with our research team coming in the middle of class and conducting about 50 surveys at a time with the students on tablets. Each data collection session required 30 minutes of instructions and then about an hour to complete the survey.
Implementing this program is a big commitment for the TFI fellows; they have to be committed to teaching this curriculum for six months, come to workshop trainings, and follow-up with me and my in-country team member by filling out our fidelity form each month that lets us know how they’re progressing through the curriculum. We had to make such that the government schools were ok with the GR curriculum; we had to get approval from the principals, so there were a lot of loops we had to go through in order to select these schools.
A: What made you apply for the Knapp Fellowship? What inspired you to create this project?
G: When I came across the Knapp Fellowship, it seemed to be a good fit, as it is a service-learning opportunity that is research-oriented and allows for a sustainable project. That’s really what I wanted to do. I am passionate about this topic - inspiring children to realize their potential and achieve their dreams no matter the barriers in India. I also understand the difficulties of being a girl in a patriarchal society that oppresses women in many ways. I was personally a middle school student in India and understand the pressure, the stress, and the weight of needing to do well in school. It was all about school. Some of the gender discrimination that I went through as a middle school student allowed me to relate to the middle school students I was working with.
I saw the Knapp Fellowship as an opportunity to do something extremely important in an international setting. The Knapp Fellowship also supported innovative ideas, which encouraged my decision to conduct all our research with the students on tablets. This is a new method of research that engages students in a fun way so that they’re excited to complete the survey.
A: Although your project isn’t finished yet, how has your project personally impacted you thus far?
G: It’s been absolutely amazing. I’ve been learning so much about myself and the communities I’ve worked with in Delhi. Just talking to the students has been so impactful. When conducting fieldwork with the students, I got the chance to look into their lives and understand their everyday struggles. It really made me question, “Why is my life like this and theirs is like that?” which is really a tough question to answer. What did they do, as innocent kids, to deserve that kind of lifestyle?
Many of these kids wake up at around 4-5 a.m. to cook breakfast for their families and prepare meals for their parents, make sure their brothers or sisters are ready for school, and then walk an hour or two to go to school. In the evening, they come back and again cook, clean, work, run errands, and do all these things to help their parents. The struggle is so real for these kids and it’s just not fair. It’s supposed to be the few years in their life to learn, play outside, laugh, have fun, play sports, and just be a kid. The amount of responsibilities they have at such a young age is upsetting, but truly inspiring.
A: Do you think you can describe the international ramifications of your project?
G: The data we collect from this evaluation will be informative for future programs and interventions on gender-sensitization curriculums. I am hoping to publish my findings so that other individuals in the field can learn from it.
One of the smartest investment opportunities for a country that can increase their national economic growth is by simply investing in a girls’ education. By educating a girl in the family, the cycle of poverty can be broken in just one generation.
Through this program, I hope to change attitudes and perceptions among adolescents which will drive change for a new generation of adults. Educating girls can break cycles of poverty in just one generation,
A: How has the Knapp fellowship aided your project? What have you used the Knapp Fellowship for?
G: Everything! I use the Fellowship to fund my travel and for funding even basic things that you usually don’t think about, like printing costs, Wi-Fi (to sync the tablets), and workshop supplies. Now that data collection is over, I’m on the data-analysis side of the project, which has other costs such as translation. The Knapp Fellowship paid for nearly every aspect of my project.
A: What piece of advice would you give to someone who is unsure about applying for the Knapp Fellowship?
G: If you feel like you have a solid project in mind and that you’re passionate about it, then I would say go for it. The worst thing that they could do is say no. The grant writing experience is so invaluable. If you want to be able to fund your projects in the future, you need to know how to write specifically in a way where you can provide a story. I was trying to think about how I could convince the Knapp Fellowship judges to invest in my project, so that they can see the profound impact it will make for women and children in Delhi and eventually throughout India. If you can see that vision, then stick to it. Even if you don’t get it, it’s a learning experience; the Knapp Fellowship is not the first grant that I applied for, but you get better as a writer on how to pitch your project.
For more information on the partnership between GW and Girl Rising, check out this article in GW Today (which Gayatri was featured in).
The Knapp Fellowship for Entrepreneurial Service-Learning makes it possible for exceptional GW students to combine scholarship with action and change the world. Prizes of up to $10,000 will be given out to student-led service projects. Check out or profile of Knapp Fellow Chloe King here.
Don't miss your chance to apply! The 2018 application is live now and is due by January 12, 2018. For questions about the Knapp Fellowship or for mentorship with your idea contact Wendy Wagner at wagnerw@gwu.edu.
Chloe King is a Knapp Fellow working to reduce food waste in DC schools, partnering with the World Wildlife Fund, where she interned last year. She is also co-founder and president of GW Scuba Club and studied abroad in Indonesia. Aleena Khan, a service-learning scholar here at the Nashman Center, spoke to Chloe about her compelling project and her experience as a Knapp Fellow.
Aleena: Can you briefly describe your project?
Chloe: Last year, I was interning for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in the fall of 2016 on their Food Waste Team – so I when I initially started, I was thinking, “How on earth does food waste relate to wildlife?” and that was normally a big question that people have when they hear about the WWF and the Food Waste Team. Why do they have that team?
Food and agricultural production are one of the biggest threats to wildlife on the planet, and at the same time, we’re wasting 38-40% of the food that we produce for consumption. It’s a massive problem, and one that I learned more about throughout the course of my internship there. My boss, Pete Pearson, was wonderful; he just said – partially because he was stressed by so many projects – to just pick whatever I want, and that I’ll manage it.
So, I picked schools – they’ve always wanted to start a project in schools – so I started developing a curriculum. I’ve developed a lesson plan, PowerPoints, educational posters, activities, things like that for an age range of 5th grade and up that’s really adjustable. I worked for them for that whole fall semester and were finalizing all those materials and other work as well that the team was doing. I then went abroad last year, from January until August, for 7 months, so I was not involved with food waste for a while.
When I was away, I heard about the Knapp Fellowship and I applied for it with the aim of working with the WWF when I got back. I knew that, regardless of whether or not I would have gotten [the Fellowship] that I wanted to work with the WWF again, since I wanted to complete what I had already done.
This big push this time around was to do it really locally and utilize the fact that the headquarters were here. There’s a lot of people in the office that have experience doing these kinds of food waste audits, and essentially being able to go into schools and helping them perform the food waste audits. At this point now, it’s really been about getting the approval of the people in DC, like the Department of General Services, DC Public Works, DCPS and the bureaucracy there, the Organization of Superintendent Schools and Education (OSSE). That’s essentially what’s been going on so far, with the project.
The plan, ultimately, is to get a lot of feedback from teachers this year when we’re actually doing the audits in the lunchroom and teaching kids about food waste so we can put this all on our website and have teachers all over the nation collecting data about food waste audits in their schools and collecting donations as well and getting that to food banks and people that need it.
A: What is the process of partner acquisition?
C: It’s been a little bit difficult and part of the reason that I love working with WWF so much is that it’s a really respected organization within the conservation space and also within the education space – kids sort of grow up looking at the Panda calendars. It’s a really good networking device to use, which is why I’ve enjoyed working with them.
Typically, I’ll reach out to them and say, “Hi, my name is Chloe and I’m from the WWF Food Waste Team; this a project that we’re working on, how can we help you?” Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is to give schools the resources to pursue this and have it be as simple as possible for them to take on. Initially, I thought that I would just reach out to a principal and they would be interested and that would be it, but it’s been way more complicated than that.
It’s mostly been about getting a really interested parent or teacher that are already engaged in stuff like this. A lot of the schools I’ve already talked to have school gardens or have been doing an environmental curriculum previously. In terms of reaching out to the local government, that’s been fairly easy because there’s been a lot of initiatives in DC in regards to food waste.
Councilman Mary Shay, for Ward 3, has been really big into food waste initiatives, so she’s been helping us with networking and getting approval because we can’t just walk into a public school and start something. That’s also been a big barrier that I hadn’t quite been aware of; we’ve had to get approval from all these different agencies before we could even begin any curriculum work. But, we’ve gotten all the approval we need and have sort of sent out information and have set a soft deadline of November 1st.
A: How has the Knapp Fellowship aided with your project?
C: The WWF does have a lot of resources, but at the same time, it is a large organization. Having a certain amount of money that I can use separate from WWF that I can really use to fulfill a need is really nice. Transportation costs become really expensive, since I’m taking the metro back and forth between sites, so it’s also helped with that.
I’m ideally hoping to use the money to hire other students that have interest in this. I gave a presentation on food waste in my climate change and policy class and asked everyone at the end that if they’re interested or know how to do audits, then I could pay them or give them a $50 gift card for doing it and a lot of people were interested in doing it. I have a good friend who interned for the WWF’s Food Waste Team this past summer, so I’m going to try to have her help me as well. That’s all what I’m probably going to use the money for.
Also, if schools need any materials, such as buckets, scales, sorting materials, I could buy them those supplies. It’s just nice to know that I have this funding available to actually pursue the project, because if I was just doing it on my own, it would be really difficult.
A: How has your project personally impacted you?
C: I’ve always been interested in the food system and how it’s worked – I’ve been a vegetarian since I was ten – but I never understood how big of an issue food waste was until I started working at WWF. I think that itself has been a really big learning experience for me, kind of learning about the other side of the food system. I think the biggest impact is going to be seeing children learn; I cannot tell you how many hours I’ve spent developing this lesson plan, and it’s going to be so nice to see it out there and to see students learn it as well as getting that immediate feedback from teachers.
A: What advice would you give to someone who’s unsure about applying for the Knapp Fellowship or is unsure if their idea is developed enough to apply for the Fellowship?
C: I think I myself applied to it literally a week before the deadline. I was thinking more and more about it and realized that it would be so helpful in aiding what I wanted to do. Even at that point, I didn’t really have much of a concrete project, but it was really helpful that I had interned at WWF before and knew it was something that I wanted to go back to. So, I would recommend for anyone who wants to apply for the Fellowship to have an organization in mind. In my experience so far with developing this project, having the resources, people, and team at the WWF that I can talk to about this has been critical to this project. Even if you don’t have a direct connection to an organization, try to foster a relationship with them. All these organizations are trying to do the same thing, and you have the unique opportunity to be the one who unites them all towards a single project, which I think it really cool to do with a student.
The Knapp Fellowship for Entrepreneurial Service-Learning makes it possible for exceptional GW students to combine scholarship with action and change the world. Prizes of up to $10,000 will be given out to student-led service projects.
Don't miss your chance to apply! The 2018 application is live now and is due by January 12, 2018. For questions about the Knapp Fellowship or for mentorship with your idea contact Wendy Wagner at wagnerw@gwu.edu
The Knapp Fellowship for Entrepreneurial Service-Learning grant awardees have been named for the 2017-2018 school year.
The award is a catalyst for new ideas and a way for students to turn their education into action. GW students have a strong track record for turning their ideas into action.
“Our hope is that this award will help students make a difference. Since arriving at George Washington three years ago, we have been struck by our students’ passion for changing the world and by the imaginative and intellectually serious way in which they harness that passion by developing concrete, innovative projects.” -President Steven Knapp
This year, funding was awarded to one graduate student studying Global Health and Epidemiology and Disease Control, Gayatri Malholtra, and one undergraduate student studying International Affairs and Environmental Studies, Chloe King.
Ms. Malholtra's project, titled, "Girl Rising Gender Equality" will partner with the global Girl Rising female education program and apply it to community centers in Delhi, India.
Ms. King's project is titled "A National Food Conservation Challenge" and utilizes a partnership with the World Wildlife Federation to create a pilot program in local schools to teach young children about mitigating food waste.
We wish them the best of luck and congratulations on their receipt of this renowned grant funded by Steven and Diane Knapp.
You can read more about the Knapp Fellowship and get ready to nominate someone for the next Knapp Fellowship cycle here.
